The present day telephone system provides means for its subscribers to verbally communicate with one another. The verbal communications must occur in real time and require that the sender and recipient have simultaneous access to their telephone stations for communication. If the sender is unable to initially place the call at a time when the recipient has access to his telephone, the sender must continue to repeat the call until the recipient is present. Similarly, if the sender desires to send the same verbal message to a number of recipients, he must repeat this process of establishing telephone contact with each recipient and repeating the message. Thus, the present day method of delivering verbal communications is time consuming and, in the business community, the time spent in such present day verbal communications is inefficient and reduces personal productivity.
While auxiliary devices, such as telephone recording systems, may be installed for individual telephone sets, such devices do not fill the need for the rapid and efficient delivery of verbal messages in the business community. A need has thus arisen for a centralized telecommunications system which eliminates many of the inconveniences, inefficiency and time consuming requirements of the existing telephone network.
One solution to this problem has been the recently developed voice message system that receives audio messages from telephone stations for storage and later retrieval by another party. A memory controlled by an electronic digital signal processing means, stores deposited verbal messages along with the telephone station addresses of the message recipients. A communications system then automatically takes over the function of delivering the messages to the addressees. A user can also access the system to inquire and receive any stored messages addressed to him.
In such voice message systems, there is a need for a user to input various items of numerical information, such as identification numbers and addressee telephone numbers, into the system from a telephone station. In addition, such systems also require that a user issue certain command signals from a telephone instrument to control the operation of the system and cause it to perform various preprogrammed operations, such as, play a message, store a recipient's messages for future recall and forward a recipient's message to a third party. Many other functions may be controlled by a user in highly sophisticated voice message systems.
Heretofore, user control of a voice message system from a telephone station has been accomplished with the entry of preprogrammed numeric control codes by means of either dial pulses or DTMF tones from the telephone instrument. This generally requires the user to either remember the numeric control code numbers or to refer frequently to a system operations manual which lists the control codes for performing each operation. In either case a user must engage in translating the control function desired into a numeric code understandable by the system. It would be highly desirable to provide a system which is responsive to the spoken words of a user for effecting both the entry of numeric information as well as the control of preprogrammed operations. Such a system would greatly enhance the ease and convenience with which a voice message system can be used.